On August 26, late afternoon, a screenshot of a tweet reached the members of Autistici/Inventati (A/I), an Italian tech collective, shattering at once their years-long server maintenance routine. While most of the country was preoccupied with record-breaking heat lingering over the end of summer holidays, that single image cast an inescapable shadow over the group.
“Today, the United States sanctioned several transnational far-left terrorist networks, including Autistici/Inventati,” Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, wrote, linking to a Treasury Department press release. The Treasury accused the group of providing technological support for the Iranian regime, violent “Antifa cells,” and other entities conspiring to “destabilize the United States.”
Washington’s sudden interest came as a complete surprise to the small volunteer collective, which hosted free communication and publishing tools for grassroots activists and organizations. Born at the apex of the millennial counter-globalization movement in 2001, the group aimed to turn the movement’s anti-fascist and anti-capitalist ideals into building blocks of an internet outside corporate hands. Over decades, its platforms attracted thousands of users who sought protection against rapidly growing digital surveillance. As of August this year, A/I hosted 16,000 email accounts, 5,500 mailing lists, 1,500 websites, and over 10,000 blogs on its popular noblogs.org platform.
The infrastructure now faced the wrath of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a little-known Treasury bureau whose powers have expanded dramatically since the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The sanctions enforcement agency has become one of Donald Trump’s signature foreign policy tools, as the White House has fed the office with an increasingly eclectic list of targets, including UN officials, International Criminal Court judges, and a growing roster of European left-wing organizations.
As the news broke, the collective was first in disbelief, then in shock. They immediately called an emergency meeting to analyze the situation and decide what to do. The discussion was heated. Many were still processing the information, and unanswered questions hit the group from all sides: How could it be contested? What does it mean for the collective, its users and members, and everyone they cared for? And why had it happened in the first place? For them, it was as if Google or WhatsApp were labeled terrorists for how someone somewhere had, allegedly, used their services.
No precedent
existed for guidance, as no other grassroots digital
communications provider had yet been swept into the same sanctions
program. No evidence was presented, and no one was charged. No
trial. No court of law to appeal to. Describing those early hours,
a former volunteer told Turning Point the collective was
prepared for “many different attacks,” but it had never crossed
their minds to be labeled as terrorists by the U.S.
“We were prepared to resist administratively, legally,
technologically, and politically—and we were successful as they
never took us down,” he said with a melancholic smile on September
16, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But we were not prepared
for an act of war.”
Ten days earlier, A/I had announced its dissolution, effective on September 18. The collective stated it could not continue its 25-year-old mission—“offering secure and non-commercial digital tools”—under the terrorist designation. They would not be safe to use anymore. While the collective’s servers now hum idle, legal experts warn that the story is far from finished, and what happens next may have far-reaching ramifications on both sides of the Atlantic.
Buried beneath layers of Treasury Department bureaucracy, the Office of Foreign Assets Control has been described as one of the most powerful yet unknown U.S. agencies, orchestrating economic warfare worldwide. Its origins trace back to 1950, when the People’s Republic of China entered the Korean War, prompting the U.S. President Harry S. Truman to resurrect World War I-era statutory powers to freeze every Chinese and North Korean asset under U.S. jurisdiction overnight.
Today, OFAC continues to enforce trade embargoes against conventional U.S. adversaries such as Cuba and Iran, but its mandate has widened dramatically over the past three decades. With a few hundred employees—mainly lawyers and intelligence analysts known as “targeters”—the agency now wields crippling sanctions regimes against a variety of non-state actors, ranging from drug cartels to the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
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